3rd robo phishing call in as many days.
Today it spoofed my own number as it’s caller ID
and pretended to be AT&T. Telling me to enter
the last 4 of my social. Their scheme was that
my account had been “flagged”. Entering
false four digits prompted in a “flag has been removed”
message. So that people easier forget. I wonder what
people want to do with the combination of my
phone number and the last 4 of my social.

It is frightening to think that they might a have a success
rate in the double digit percentages with this scheme.

The iTunes music gave me grief before. So I use Amazon.
Or, let’s say I try to.

A song with a wikipedia page is obviously easy to find.
I can preview it. Yes, it is what I thought it would be.

No surprise that the purchase button is easy to.

They have a new player / app they like to push.
The old amazon downloader did not cause any troubles,
so I choose that one.
The file downloads in no time. That USED to be the problem:
Getting those large files to your computer.
Clicking on it, the mac tells me that this app is from an unidentified
developer.
In system preferences I tell it to open it anyway.
It does, but shows an empty screen.
In my downloads is still the amazon file. I click on that one.
Nothing happens. Well, not really nothing: The downloaded file
vanished.
Then I go in Amazon to my purchases music. The song is not there
either. The 0.89 USD I spent will probably the only memory of those
3:18 (the length of the song) that I spent to get this song.

Buying music should be easy in 2014. It turns out in my specific
way of trying this it totally is not. I don’t buy music often. So I don’t feel
like researching all that might be involved.

I rather ramble here about it. Also since it is quiet symptomatic:

The actual act of copying a couple of bits to my computer is such a
small part of the overal action. It used to be that DRM was part of
the problem. It no longer is. Still have I have to deal with interfaces
and software that changes / breaks every time I like to use it.

The background is that the people running and maintaining these
systems do not care for the “Alpha to Omega - Experience” enough.

The late Mr Jobs was really good at making sure that things ran
as smooth as possible for certain flows from start to finish. If you don’t
then with computers and systems lots of ‘stuff’ will creep into the flow.
And the system will start depending on this extra stuff of other parts of
the system.

If you think that Byzantine bureaucracy was horrible then you have
no idea how our digital future will be.

Lufthansa is on their 8th strike in 2014. If you are affected this is how it looks like:

An email arrives that the final leg of flight got cancelled 24 hours before departure.
Logging in to the website suggests to get a train ticket.
Trying to do so results in a generic failure.
Phone lines are not being answered by Lufthansa in Germany or the US.
At 6am there is another email informs you that the outbound flight is also cancelled.
Phone lines still don't work.
The web interface says to contact phone numbers that have not been answered in the last 20 hours.
The phone numbers tell you to check the web.

The first realistic rendering of a human in a computer I even laid eyes on got created by Chris Jones in Australia. If Intel would have any sense then they would give him everything he needs so that he can make a super bowl spot.

It is much easier for a director to dial in some emotions on an “Eckman board” rather than trying to coax them out of a drugged up little twat being full of itself. CAA better get their sh*t and required legislation together.

It will take a little while, but this WILL be a big deal: Completely artificial movies that just look like reality.

In this study two small (25) groups of (mostly female) students were ask to keep their hands in ice water.

Their averages were 40.12 and 42.03 seconds. Which gets to show the range of variance with a small sample of 25.

They were told that they would do a different experiment after that: evaluating product design. One group handled Noodles, the other a bottle of Ibuprofen for 2 minutes.
After that they did another ice water test and now the results were:

45.28 seconds (instead of 40.12) for the Ibuprofen group, while the Noodles people lasted for 41.83 second instead of 42.03.

I wonder what would happen if one would repeat this experiment. As much one would want to have that handling pain killers will reduce pain the actual difference is so small that it could easily be part of noise to be expected in a sampling size of 25.

Big corporations have their own problems. And if they don’t have them, then they create them. Like hiperos.

Imagine people reading a couple of Franz Kafka novels, putting them down and then proclaiming: “Hey lets build this (badly) and slap a web interface over it”
Of course they were intrigued by all the horrifying concepts and scary details in those nightmarish (yet awesome books) of that bohemian insurance clerk.

I wonder how much productivity gets lost by people waiting for hiperos to load, or trying to decipher what those random popups mean, how to find what
is missing in which form, etc etc etc.

Amazing how bad some things look in light of the second decade of the 21st century.

I don’t have any expectations if it comes to end consumer support. These days I anticipate phone systems that will try very hard to make you give up. Should you reach a person they seem often not to care about your issues, their job or anything for that matter.

When I ran into questions with a recent Canon camera I called them anyway. I have been massively and positively surprised: After 90 seconds I spoke to somebody who cared. He had the camera I had in hand within a minute.
I sent them test pictures, and now they are looking at them. Regardless what the outcome of this investigation will be: I have the feeling that they care about their product and my experience with it.

As I said: I have not expected this. It will probably be a long time before I would consider another manufacturer. Unless there is a killer feature in a competitors product I will always look for a Canon device. I don’t mind paying more for it.
It might very well be that other companies have awesome support too. The risk to run into issues and they don’t is just to high.

OK - I really am a laggard. Using Firefox in 2014 was not really the best thing to do. But it got me where I needed to be. Other browsers are of course always part of the mix of things to use. Comes with the job.

But with Firefox 29 today they finally pushed me over. As usually it is a minute detail: I like to have around 20 things 1 click away. Firefox used to be able to ONLY display those bookmarks without the favicon.

Since I identify those things by 1 or 2 letters it makes a big difference if I have the favicons visible or not. With Chrome I never found a way to get rid of them. Now with Firefox they just poppped in.

So I might as well use Chrome, and maybe look for a way to get rid of them there. There is no way that I will invest any of that into a browser that it is declining. These days Internet Explorer actually causes less troubles than Firefox.

Between January 2012 and March 2014 more than 160 giga dollars were spent for Internet security. You would think that much of it would care about Encryption. One would further think that some of this money would go into evaluation of the actual code of library mostly in use: OpenSSL. Apparently not enough.

There are between 3 and 10 contributors to OpenSSL, which provide a total of around 50 code commits a month.

If the security Industry would spend only 0.01% of their earnings on these code commits, then each one would have a review budget of 10 kilo dollars.

Today’s story on flight MH370 is that pings got picked up by a Chinese ships. Blackboxes seem to emit a signal every second for a couple of weeks.

Maybe it would be better if these devices would send a ping not every even second. Technically it should be easy to give black boxes a fix random
ping frequency. I probably would help that the device you are looking for emits a ping every 1.345 seconds.

Since I have been on the Internet for a while I unfortunately have domains registered with Network Solutions.

They were the first company that one could register domains with.

They are so bad, it is not even funny.

With having your domains there you can also have DNS service with them. However: Their DNS servers go away. That is really really really bad.
That’s like your car stalling at random times. And doing so repeatedly.

The example with a car is not the right one, since most DNS providers are simply never down. They just work work work. While Network Solutions Servers don’t.

But that is -unfortunately- not the end of what is wrong with them:

Their web interface sucks. Much like with Godaddy its main purpose is to sell you more crap. Not to let you do what you want to do. That is really hard.
Imagine the DMV but having hundreds of beggars, peddlers and the like trying to push something on you while you wait.

Their phone system is just as awful as most phone systems are.

How rotten Networksolutions is I learned today:

I happen to have a .com domain with them that will expire (thank god!) in 2 months. Today I got 2 mails: They thanked more for my order of the corresponding
.info domain. They didn’t want any money for it. But it is ridiculous since I had to cancel this domain that I didn’t want.

What are they thinking???

Domain registration is EXTREMELY lucrative. For a couple of bytes one pays good money.

Network Solutions had more money than god. They had lots clients. Serving them just average could have kept them
in business for a long time.
Instead they tried to make even more money.
And all they accomplish is to royally fuck this up.

Register anywhere you like. Hell, if you don’t mind being exposed to half of the rant-points here, then even use the dreadful Godaddy. But Never Ever use Network Solutions. Really.
You will regret it. They gotten so continuously worse during the 15 years that I tolerated them in my life, I can only envision in horror what they future will bring …

I tried to download an online statement from the Wells Fargo today. What fun!

While I could do so for one account - on the one I needed I got nothing. I could select the year, or click on “Recent Statements”.

I called Wells Fargo. After ten minutes the first human I was able to talk to told me that I would need to speak to the online department for that.

So I was put on hold for another ten minutes. ( 1 800 956 44 42 would be their direct number). WF hold music cut deep grooves in my auditory system in the mean time.
It is the most obnixous loop one can think of. Amazing how they can literally have humans listen to this junk for years each day and nobody complains.

Once there was a human on the other end he was able to ‘enable online statements’ for the account in question. Not sure why that was not on in the first place.
After signing off and on again I did indeed my past records. Which is awesome.

I friendly declined the second offer from the WF operative if he could sell me any additional services at this point. That’s a bit like trying to sell timeshare junk to people
having a root canal.

All this would not be worth wasting any ink over. It’s just corporate America how it slogs along day after day extracting billions from people trying to get by (and from me too) .

When I clicked on the actual download link all I would find is a file called

session.cgi

Turns out that WF online puts the PDF statement into file with that name.

Renaming to

anything_you_like.pdf

made it accessible. I decided not to spend another 20 minutes in the Wells Fargo phone loop to tell them about this unfortunate bug.

I moved five months agao and had not installed the nest yet. When I hooked it up it only showed

a red blinking light

On top of the unit. It turned out that the device needed to get charged via the mini USB adapter in the back. After about 5 minutes, a small dull nest home screen showed up.
After maybe another minute the screen said:

Please attach display
to its base

It turns out that this message tends to be over optimistic: After connecting the device
it fell back into the red-blink slumber.

I gave the device 10 more minutes of USB charge. I used an actual physical charger, not a USB connection from a computer. The ampere that the unit sees can be quiet different.
A drained rechargeable battery certainly appreciates the flow a nice and solid current.
After said 10 minute charge things got better: the thermostat started ‘boot’ while being connected and it was able to operate the heat pump. At this point it still said

low battery

in the Wifi and other connection related screens. Since this did not change for an hour I gave the display another 30 minutes on the USB charger and then was able to set up the network connection as expected.

It is quiet easy to block a website if you run a mac and are not afraid to edit system files.
Simply adding

127.0.0.1 www.facebook.com

in /etc/hosts takes care of all facebook traffc. Not only will the site be not accessible navigating to other page that run embedded facebook will also no longer tell Mr Zuckerberg & Co where you are going on the Internet.

If you like to use the MegaRAID write cache feature make sure that you indeed have a version 2.0 key.

Version 2 keys have the part number LSI00292 while Version 1 keys have the part number LSI00248.

It is possible to get the Version 1 flavor, since both keys share a part number. If you use a Version 1 key
nothing will say this in the MegaRAID “WebBIOS” software or any of the command line tools that LSI offers.
The only indicator will be the part number on the packaging and the fact that write cache will not be enabled.

It seems that in any dying project the bureaucrats, middle managers and otherwise challenged people are the last to leave. They cling on to past greatness and try to re-evoke what is gone.

The last Firefox update 22 put the latest available Quicktime Version 7.6.8 on their blocklist. Clips will not longer play, but a warning will show up, requesting an update. Only problem is that Quicktime 7.6.6 is not out of date for OS X 10.6.8. FF has acknowledged this and it is fixed. But a download of FF still has the broken blocklist.xml.

wanting watch sar run in a terminal in linux indefinitely one can start it with

sar 1 0

The first number indicates the sampling time in seconds. The second number is usually the number of samples you like ot see.

If this number is 0 then sar will not stop. And as another bonus will look at how large the terminal is and will display a new header
accordingly.

Command line can be user friendly. I really like those little gems that show up in all software: People spending their time to make something better. It is like a little gift to the world. With software the value of even a little detail can potentially be significant. Which is an awesome thing.

For all we know it might very well be that the feature described here will please people in a hundred years from now.

I don’t think that mankind will manage to drop unix at this point. Neither can it give up on the use of steel. Yes there might be new systems, much like there have been new materials.

The new gets all the attention. But in many cases the new will not replace the old entirely. Only journalists tend to think that way. In reality the findings of Mr Newton help Boeing and Airbus today to build tubes with wings that shuttle people around the globe close to the sound of speed.